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CATHERINE MASSIN

BIO
Catherine Massin (performance– visual art– writings–Brussels Belgium).
While finishing her studies at the Sorbonne (Paris), the French–born Catherine Massin joined as young actress the Théâtre du Labyrinthe. She received training in contemporary dance in France and in the USA. Between 1983 and 1996 she worked as a dancer and choreographer. Her dance company created pieces of innovative movement theatre, performed all over Europe. From the 90’s,she created choreographies for her students at the Hoge School voor Dans in Antwerp. Later on she collaborated with the musicians of the NASMA group (contemporary music from the 20th century) and started to experiment the expressive possibilities of oil and acryl painting using the movement and the print of the hand. From 2000 she worked as improviser joining the performance collective Bains::Connective based in Brussels.
She created video installations and experimented the relation between body, language and writings. The score of the play Conversations that she created with Pierre Rubio and that was on European tour is based on physical and verbal language. Catherine Massin also collaborated on writings with the writer Anne Penders (entretemps 2002), the dancer Anouk LLaurens (s’ imagine 2007) and an association of visual artists on connecting words, dance and painting. “I have always been interested in the physical expressions of emotions; I used photography, paintings and videos in my choreographies, evolving into new tools to express instinct, emotion and intellect encountering new faces, new places, playing with I, you, we, he, she, it, they, touch, say, move, remember, see, articulate, feel, poetry, dance, feeling, anatomy, image, thoughts, personal history, collective history.” Catherine Massin is cultural ambassador for UNESCO–IHE for water education.

PROJECT

“Visions, a research on poetic documentation based on Lisa Nelson work”

“Visions” is an original combination between movement, image, drawing, text and audio recordings. The research is interested in the translation of movement into multi-modal documentation, and in the articulation of these documents with each other’s in order to create poetic experiences. The whole proposal is based on Lisa Nelson’s ‘Tuning scores’1: It uses sensorial exploration to generate movement, inhibition to find new path and multiple points of views to document a shared event.

The object of “Visions” is the « eyes-hand coordination » which is the dialogue between the vision and the hands necessary to execute the simplest task. The documentation will present a possible interpretation of this subject from multiple and subjective points of view. All participating artists will practice all modes of documentation and will communicate their opinion to each other’s through their produced documents. Experiences will be reinvented with the help of different voices to create a polyphony that will give a sense of the initial global situation while presenting it in a new light.
The documentation will stand as an artistic proposal. It will first take the form of an installation-performance that will combine drawings, texts, video, audio recordings and live actions. It will later be edited on a website and propose composition workshop where multi-modal documentation will be used as a reflexive tool to unfold performance and composition consciousness.